The 500k Apex

I am pleased to report that as of the beginning of December 2022, Synthetic Daisies blog has reached 500,000 reads. The blog started over the 2008 Holiday season (14 years ago) and took about a year to garner significant readership. Over the years, Synthetic Daisies has participated in the Carnival of Evolution, several SciComm (Science Communication) initiatives, and charted the research progress of a number of initiatives (including the DevoWorm group).

Number of posts by year. Click to enlarge.

Although the number of time investment has declined in recent years, the posts have continued to accumulate reads. Synthetic Daisies has a Github repository and overlay site where some of the more popular posts are profiled. The Github repo also features associated code and other items from these posts. 

Number of readers over the course of 14 years. Click to enlarge.

More to report in another 200,000 to 300,000 reads!

Synthetic Daisies Summary for 2020

It has been awhile since I've done a readership post. But as 2020 comes to a close, let's do a Top 10 review of posts and pages for the past 12 months, ranked by readership. 

Top 10 posts for 2020 (by readership). Click to enlarge.

The Carnival of Evolution posts (#46 and #58) and "Playing the Long Game of Human Biological Variation" are the top three posts of all time. "Ratchets in Nature" is the only blog post to be formally cited (2 times according to Google Scholar). Readership seems to be down from years past. Only two of the top 10 posts for the year were actually written this year ("Welcome, Summer of Coders" and "Silver Linings of COVID19"). Another post that made the 11 spot (nearly making the list) was another post from 2020, the post on the ASAPBio Preprint Symposium from September. 

Post on the ASAPBio Session on the "Past, Present, and Future of Preprints" (Post #11 for 2020 by readership). Click to enlarge.

I have also posted a view of the top 10 pages viewed in 2020. The pages were created several years ago, and are not typically updated as much as I would like. The top view was on the "Hard to Define Events Workshop", a session from 2012 hosted at that year's Artificial Life conference. We never followed up on this workshop (it's been eight years!), but might be an interesting thing to create a virtual presence around. A meaning of the blog name, a list of favorite blogs, and various presentations round out the top 10. One more page of note is the "Popular Algorithmics" page, which is an accessible presentation of various algorithms. This is something that might be moved to the Synthetic Daisies Github organization as an open-source collection where people can contribute their own entries (a sort of Wikipedia of algorithms).

Top 10 pages for 2020 (by readership). Click to enlarge.

Aside from code and open-source content related to specific blog posts, the Synthetic Daisies Github organization also hosts the Synthetic Daisies meta-blog. This is meant to be a collection of more substantial content from the original blog, organized thematically and presented in a manner similar to an overlay journal. This includes featured posts and thematic collections, such as posts on Evolution or Models, Philosophy of Science, and Representation.

Check out the Synthetic Daisies meta-blog. Click to enlarge.

That's all for this year. Check us out in 2021 with a whole new set of posts!